Tag: lifestyle-design

The Rugby World Cup starts today! And for the first time in years I can confidently say that I can watch whichever matches I want, wife permitting of course.

In previous years I have had to miss a lot of the matches due to work commitments. Now I have the ability to control when I work I can rearrange my day if I want. This allows me to keep working, and hence earning some money, but gives me the freedom to choose when to do it. I haven’t really had any real tangible use for this new found freedom until now…

Obviously I want to watch all of the England matches and the timing of all the groups games are quite nice this time round anyway, all being on weekend mornings and nothing ridiculously early. But to get really into the tournament there are lots of other matches that deserve to be watched, some of which are on during the week when I would normally be working.

Overall I thought the book was pretty good, definitely worth a read. I would recommend it to everyone out there especially anyone who has the nagging feeling that there must be more to life than the normal life that seems to be forced upon you.

There is some common ground with The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss as this book also tackles the idea of living the life you want but instead on focusing on how to reduce your time spent working on stuff you may not enjoy the focus is on doing what you really love, working harder than before but on stuff that you really enjoy…

In other words the book helps you create, or at least helps you realise that it is possible to create, your ideal lifestyle based around something you are really passionate about.

At the start of the year I set myself a list of goals to try and achieve in 2011. As we have now passed the half way mark in the year I am going through my list and looking at the progress of each item.

This is a follow on post from Part 1 so you might want to read that one first. This post covers the remaining categories which are Self Improvement, Finances, Photography and Travel.

Overall I am very pleased with my progress so far. It really does help to have some goals to aim for. I wonder how many of these things I would have achieved it I had just pottered along aimlessly as I was doing before…

As I mentioned the other day there is another huge 72 hour sale. This time it’s known as the Rock Your Life sale and there is a collection of 22 different courses and eBooks to help with many different aspects of your life.

Anyway this massive collection would normally cost £1087, if you bought all of the items individually, but for a very limited time you can get the whole bundle for just $97 (about £60). $5 of that also goes to charity which is a nice touch.

For starters the full version of Sell Your Crapby Adam Baker is included which I only just recommended the other week. This in itself normally costs $47, nearly half of the total cost…

Once again there are so many resources there is bound to be a few that should spark some kind of interest. But you are going to have to hurry as the sale closes at 17:00 (UK time) on Thursday 23rd June…

I have recently read The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. The main concept of the book is pretty staggering when you think about it. Working for just 4 hours a week seems impossible so it must be a bit of a get rich quick style sales strategy. At least that was my initial thoughts when I first heard the name of the book branded about…

The basic premise is that you can set up a business and after a certain amount of time you can whittle the amount of your time required to maintain the business down to about 4 hours per week. Explained this way it already seems a bit more obtainable.

Anyway I thought I might as well give a quick review of the book that has inspired the use of the term Lifestyle Design all over the internet.

While on holiday last week I was trying to come up with some future posts for this blog. This got me to start thinking about the topics I cover. It is a bit of a vague area to say the least so I sat down and made a concious decision about the areas I should focus on.

This should help me come up with more focused content, which happens to be one of my goals for this year. Hopefully this should benefit my readership as well if the content is more consistent then it should be easier to make a decision whether or not to keep coming back. An added benefit is that this focus could help build a bit of a community…

Anyway first things first, what exactly am I going to focus my writing around? I do not want to go too specific as this is supposed to be somewhere to release my views and feelings about different things that affect me in the hope that I may help or inspire others along the way. On the other hand I cannot continue the way I am without some kind of restriction on what I write about.

One of the benefits of being your own boss is the extra freedom that you are rewarded with. If a friend calls me up, out of the blue, and asks what I am doing tomorrow the chances are I can rearrange my day to meet up if only for a short while.

When working the normal 9–5 I was even concerned about asking for time off to go to the doctors. I would never have dared to ask for a couple of hours off to visit a friend, who maybe only comes back this way once a year and is only in town for one afternoon, even if I could have easily made that time back up…

To make things even worse evenings used to feel so precious, as a time to unwind from a hard days work, that even if the friend offered to meet up that evening instead I would sometimes have to refuse. This feels like such a shame and I felt that slowly over the years I have lost contact with a few of my friends due to the lack of free time I had.

The amount of information was pretty amazing with ebooks and online courses from some very high profile people on the internet. Then when you see that the price has been reduced by over 90% it makes it hard to believe that this is even possible…

The only catch is that this offer is only around for 72 hours! So if you are thinking about starting a small business then you may want to at least check the 23 products included in this offer.

Personal Finance is a tricky business. When you have a decent amount of money coming in each month budgeting seems almost pointless. As long as there is money in the bank then buying a few things here and there shouldn’t matter. Should it?

Well that’s the way my wife and I used to think. Luckily we have no debts, except the mortgage, and manage to pay off our credit cards every month. After a while though this started to become a little harder each month, having to move money around from one account to another to make sure there was enough to cover each bill.

One way to cope with this is to create a budget and try to stick to it. This sounds like the perfect solution but it is very hard to keep track of every part of a budget. The more I focus on one area of the budget the further of track another part seems to get… I have a project to create an app for that, which should help me keep on track on all areas of the budget more easily, but that is still a way off yet.

Overall though budgeting is definitely a good thing as it highlights where the money is going and allows you to make changes as you deem fit. It has certainly helped Shirley and myself become a bit more frugal without feeling like we are missing out on anything.